Brainstorm Blog

Instead of posting a tDCS Tuesday article today, we're here to give you some exciting news! We recently partnered with Interval, an engineering and design company based out of Boston, to help with the professional production of our headset. There will be a lot of updates from us in the coming months as we get closer to having a finished product so stay tuned because there's going to be a lot going on here at Brainstorm!

Here's the fourth tDCS Tuesday post, sorry about missing the post last week, I was traveling and could not get internet access until it was too late. This week's papers include tDCS as a treatment for traumatic brain injuries, tDCS as a way of improving long term motor learning, and tDCS as a way of enhancing bodily emotion recognition.

I'm going to start doing a post like this every Tuesday listing three cool tDCS papers with a quick summary of each and calling it tDCS Tuesday. We'll still be writing full posts like we used to, this'll just give a quick view into the more recent advances in tDCS research. This week's top 3 are about tDCS in relation to crack addiction, exercise, and aging. Check them out!

I read an article in Popular Science that referenced a paper using tDCS as a way to make people perceive others as more attractive, I looked into it and it was pretty interesting so here's my take on the Chib et al 2013 paper [1].

This blog post is primarily based on a study published April 17th, by Dr. Roberta Sellaro and her colleagues at Leiden University in the Netherlands. Before getting into the study, I’m going to give a little background on the previous research that led up to this study. This study looked at the effects of tDCS on stereotyping behavior.

I picked Alzheimer’s disease (AD) as the next topic in the series of neurological disorders and tDCS for a bunch of reasons. One of the biggest reasons is that often the first question I am asked after describing tDCS to someone is “So could this be used for people with Alzheimer’s or something like that?” Finally after being unable to answer this question adequately so many times I decided to do some research.

Most people know what Alzheimer’s disease is, but for completeness I figured I’d include a short description of the disease. Alzheimer’s disease is a neurodegenerative disease characterized by slow degradation of memory, thinking and behavioral processes. For more information on Alzheimer’s check out the Alzheimer’s Association website at:

Depression is the most common mental illnesses in the US with ~14.8 million or 6.7% of the population suffering from Major Depressive Disorder or MDD each year [1]. There are many treatment options available for MDD, but each case is different and what works for one patient may not work for another. In some cases a person can be diagnosed with what is known as Treatment-resistant Depression. Treatment-resistant Depression symptoms will persist despite the best efforts of physicians and mental health professionals, in most of these cases the patient has tried every medication and nothing seems to work.